Japanese Man Uses AI To Replicated Copyrighted Image

For years, the biggest copyright fights around generative AI have focused on the companies building the technology. Now, for the first time, a regular user is at the center of a criminal case. In Japan, a 27-year-old man is being recommended for prosecution after allegedly using Stable Diffusion to recreate a copyrighted illustration and selling the result as a book cover.

Police in Chiba Prefecture say the man issued an enormous number of prompts — reportedly around 20,000 — in an effort to push the open-source model into reproducing a specific protected image. According to reporting from Yomiuri Shimbun (machine translated), this appears to be the first case anywhere in the world where an end user, not the creator of the AI tool, is facing criminal copyright charges over AI-generated artwork.

Until now, enforcement has almost always targeted developers. Getty Images famously went after Stability AI in the UK, and courts in the US have repeatedly ruled that AI-generated images can’t be copyrighted at all. Going after individual users has been viewed as unrealistic — they typically don’t have the resources of a tech company, and proving deliberate copying inside a complex diffusion model is extremely difficult.

Legal analyst Kensaku Fukui notes that the key factor here is intent. The sheer volume of prompts and the alleged effort to steer the system toward a specific artwork could set this case apart from the everyday “draw this in x style” prompts people type for fun. If prosecutors argue successfully that he used Stable Diffusion as a kind of sophisticated photocopier, the ruling could have major implications.

It’s still unclear which artist or copyright holder (if any) filed a complaint, or exactly what image was supposedly duplicated. What is clear is that this case pushes into new territory: at what point does prompting an AI shift from creative play to criminal reproduction? With most lawsuits still aimed at the companies behind these models, the outcome in Chiba could set an early precedent — and determine whether everyday users of generative AI may one day be held criminally liable too.

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